In stark contrast to the rich literary history in which Wang Anyi brilliantly anchors her fictional universe lies the seeming weightlessness of “history” against which her novel plays out. Although The Song of Everlasting Sorrow spans four crucial decades of modern Chinese history, from 1946 to 1986, many of the historical landmarks we naturally expect are absent. All of the keywords that seem inevitable in modern China — the Civil War, Liberation, the Great Leap Forward, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Cultural Revolution, the Gang of Four, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, the Open Door Policy — are virtually nonexistent in the novel’s narrative. This significant absence points to a new conception of history that is formulated by subtle changes in fashion and popular culture rather than politics and historical movements, an approach that stands in stark contrast to other works of contemporary Chinese historical fiction. In discussing the historical vision of her novel, Wang Anyi writes:
Some people accuse me of “avoiding” the impact that large-scale historical events have on practical life. But I don’t feel that is the case at all. I personally feel that the face of history is not built by large-scale incidents; history occurs day after day, bit by bit transforming our daily lives. For instance the way women on the streets of Shanghai went from wearing cheongsam dresses to Lenin-style jackets—that is the kind of history I am concerned with.7
This is not to say that the historical forces that surround the characters in The Song of Everlasting Sorrow do not affect them — think of Director Li’s fatal plane crash toward the end of the Civil War or Mr. Cheng’s death during the Cultural Revolution — but history never takes center stage: instead it quietly plays out in the shadows on the periphery of the everyday. As the novel opens, Shanghai does not appear on a massive canvas, but gradually takes form from a series of dots and lines, signaling a fictional universe built on the details of daily life. Unlike Bo Juyi’s famous poem, which is written on a grand stage of politics, rebellion, and dynastic crisis, Wang Anyi’s tragic ballad quietly plays out in the backalley longtang neighborhoods of Shanghai, where “tell-it-as-it-is,” “less-ismore,” and the cycles of fashion rule the (every)day. And where two-thirds of Bo’s poem is devoted to the emperor’s mourning and his quest to find his lover in the netherworld after her death, who is there to mourn Wang Qiyao? In the end, the death of “Miss Third Place” is perhaps simply another piece of gossip to float through the labyrinthine back alleys of Shanghai.
This afterword is aimed at introducing Wang Anyi and her Song of Everlasting Sorrow and providing a series of different perspectives from which to approach — or reflect upon — this seminal literary work. From cycles of recurrence to the politics of nostalgia and from literary history to a new historiography of the everyday — these are but a handful of the themes to which The Song of Everlasting Sorrow takes us. And while critics have described her work with many labels, including nostalgic, Shanghai-school, and feminist, Wang Anyi has rejected them all, a stance that has only increased the complexity of ideas with which we must approach her work. The novel has been alternately read as a postmodernist showcase and a postsocialist testimony to the fate of Shanghai in the twentieth century.
In the years since its initial publication, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow has come to be recognized as one of the true classics of contemporary Chinese fiction. At the same time, just as Wang Qiyao inspired Old Colour’s nostalgic longing for an “old Shanghai” he never knew, so The Song of Everlasting Sorrow has itself helped give rise to a new “Shanghai fever” that has swept China since the late nineties. In this context, new meaning is brought to the life (and death) of Wang Qiyao as she is posthumously transformed into a true “Miss Shanghai,” a fictional incarnation of this Paris of the Orient’s imagined past and a new icon for it as it looks toward the future.
M. B.
Santa Barbara, California
March 2007
Notes
1 See Perry Link, “Rebels, Victims, and Apologists,” in New York Times, July 6, 1986. “Lilies” and other representative works by Ru Zhijuan are available in the collection Lilies and Other Stories (Peking: Panda Books, 1985).
2 Page [orig 46].
3 Wang Anyi, “Chang hen ge bu shi huaijiu” (“The Song of Everlasting Sorrow is not a work of nostalgia”), in Wang Anyi Shuo (Wang Anyi speaks) (Hunan: Hunan wenyi chubanshe, 2003), 121.
4 Page [orig 771].
5 Page 554. The original Chinese refers to the “rainbow skirt and feathered coat” (ni shang yu yi), a description that actually appears twice in Bo Juyi’s original poem to describe Yang Guifei’s clothing and which has come to be equated with the tragic consort. Thanks to Alice Cheang for this observation.
6 See Wang Dewei (David Der-wei Wang), “Shanghai xiaojie zhi si: Wang Anyi de ‘Chang hen ge’” (“Death of Miss Shanghai: Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow”), in Wang Anyi, Chang hen ge (The Song of Everlasting Sorrow) (Taipei: Maitian, 1996), 3–10; and Wang Dewei, “Haipai zuojia, you jian chuanren: Wang Anyi lun” (“A new successor to the Shanghai Schooclass="underline" On Wang Anyi”), in Kua shiji fenghua dangdai xiaoshuo 20 jia (Into the new millennium: Twenty Chinese fiction writers) (Taipei: Maitian, 2002), 35–54.
7 Wang Anyi, “Wo yanzhong de lishi shi richang de” (“The history I see is that of the everyday”), in Wang Anyi Shuo (Wang Anyi speaks) (Hunan: Hunan wenyi chubanshe, 2003), 155.